Christmas Rewind!

First off, I hope you all had a *wonderful* Christmas! We definitely got spoiled this year and enjoyed lots of delicious meals and family company. But now I finally have some time to share a few of the festivities that went on in our classroom the few crazy days before Christmas break. Here we go!

We are still focusing on descriptive writing, and those of you who have been reading along for a while now will probably remember the descriptive writing guessing game that my firsties participated in last year. Well, it was such a hit that I brought it back for another round!

First we "decorated" a simple Christmas tree template, making sure to add lots of unique details. Then we put our descriptive writing skills to the test and wrote a detailed description of our trees.

Then for the fun part! I hung up all of their trees and read each description one by one. After each description, the kiddies had to guess which tree matched the description. 

I still love this activity because it really helps drive home how important it is to be specific with their descriptions, but also to help them understand what types of details are important to include. They did an awesome job; most descriptions and trees were matched on the first guess!

You can download the tree template and writing paper by clicking HERE or either picture below:

This year I edited the template to include dotted printing lines so if you'd prefer the version below, click HERE.

My kids love centres so we also spent lots of time the last few days working through some fun and engaging (and purposeful) centres. 

What originally began as me creating a few purposeful but festive centre activities to use the last week of school, quickly turned into an entire Print-and-Go worksheet pack for Christmas and winter (with 10 math and 10 literacy activities)...so basically 5 minutes of work turned into a few hours haha Story of my life! But I'm so excited with the result:

(Click HERE in order to view each worksheet up close by using your zoom)

We used just about every activity from this pack throughout the week (so they have all been kid-tested and enjoyed!) and I was so excited to see how engaged my firsties were. Seriously, this amount of focus the last week of school before Christmas break completely shocked me:

My firsties ROCK!!! P.S. how stinkin' cute are they in their PJs? Yes, this is the LAST DAY and they're all working their little booties off. Thank you, Santa!

Anyways, I usually put out 2 math and 2 literacy activities each time and always had a few just-for-fun "fast finisher" activities that the kids could grab and bring back to their centre to work through until it was time to visit another centre.

I just printed off a bunch of these colour-by-number pages that I found through Pinterest HERE: 

There's also a TON of cute (and free!) printable activities over at Activity Village that I've used for the same purpose. 

If you'd like to check out the Print and GO! No Prep Math & Literacy Worksheet Pack for Christmas and Winter in more detail, click HERE :)

And that about wraps up our whirlwind of a week! I am still in shock that Christmas has already come and gone...slow down, time! 

I hope you all have a fantastic New Years :)

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Snow Day Activities & Holiday Hoopla

If you follow me on Instagram (@funwithfirsties) you may have seen this picture yesterday:

Yes...That is what happened over the course of ONE day. Needless to say, today was a "snow day" since busses were cancelled...I had 5 little firsties show up today. Lucky for them because we had loads of fun! 

Now normally, being an incredibly anal obsessive compulsive control freak slightly organized individual, I am hesitant to whip out paint and other "messy" art supplies in a room full of 21 squirrely 5 and 6-year-olds, and yet with only 5 little humans in my classroom today I was having dreams of twinkling glitterized craft possibilities...then this quickly popped into my head:

Soooooooo we stuck to paint. 

If you have never tried this art activity yourself, you've probably seen it before. It's one of my favs because there are so many possibilities and the finished products look so professional!!

All you do is tape off whatever design you want on a piece of art paper using painters tape (I used masking tape because I didn't have painters tape at the time...the only difference is that painters tape is much easier to peel off later on). You can tape off random lines like I did here, or you can make a specific picture, or even spell your name! Then, all you do is "fill in the blanks" by painting all of the empty spaces:

Wait for the paint to dry and then gently peel off the tape to reveal your masterpiece!

LOVE them!!!

Next, we read a bunch of my beloved pigeon books:

(click HERE if you're interested in knowing what those Sight Word Sentences are all about!)

Then we made our own pigeon storybooks! I originally posted the details about this activity HERE.

It was cute to read their storybooks. I had "Don't Let the Pigeon Eat a Cupcake," "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Four Wheeler," and other cute creations.

Last but not least, for all of my Instagram buddies who helped me out with my anchor chart debacle (yes, it WAS a debacle!), I finally constructed a solution!!!

You can read about the original issue by clicking the pic below:

With full intensions of dressing in black and busting into the school at midnight with hooks and a power drill, one of my brilliant coworkers suggested I try Command hooks. DUH!!!! Those things are seriously a teacher's best friend.

So off to Walmart I went and constructed this:

It's not exactly attractive but it works and I like it!

I stuck two Command hooks on the metal frame of my bulletin board and hung a $3.00 rod between the two:

Then I put my charts on binder rings and slid them on the rod.

Problem. Freaking. SOLVED. Woohoo!!! 

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With the new addition of all this snow, it's official that I'm feeling some serious holiday spirit; Our Christmas tree is up, and the house is decorated from top to bottom, inside and out!

So it's perfect timing that I launched my first holiday unit on TpT! 

*UPDATED 2016: There are two covers above as the product has since been updated*

I seriously cannot WAIT to bust out these activities with my firsties. 

They're all *completely* editable; meaning, if you're in pre-K or even Grade 2 you can customize this pack by adding ANY words you'd like. Check it out:

(If you're interested, hop on over to TpT to check it out!)

Now I'm off to pray that tomorrow is a snow day, too ;)